Rare and Strange Encounters of the Curator's Kind

Anne Pushkal

Acme ballot box, c. 1880, Public Domain

What would you do with a bottle of medicine that had expired – during the Taft administration? If you’re Judy Chelnick, you catalogue it, along with iron lungs and papier-mâché anatomical models. For curators, there’s no telling what rare or strange things they will encounter in a day’s work. Mike Sappol of the National Library of Medicine, for example, once curated an exhibition that included the preserved body of Balto, the famous sled dog while Sarah Leavitt of the National Building Museum used a real 1920s roadster – and her son’s toy cars – in an exhibition about parking garages. A curator collects, cares for, researches, and interprets a collection, and organizes displays and exhibitions. Many people think of curators in connection with art museums and galleries, but they may work in institutions like libraries, historical societies, and universities. Curators also work with corporate and private collections. Research is central to their work. If you visit the monastery of St. John on the Greek island of Patmos, you might run into Alain Touwaide, searching for whatever secrets can’t be found in the 15,000 books on ancient Mediterranean lore that he and his wife Emanuela Appetiti have amassed. To learn more about what curators do, where they do it and how they do it, I talked to three past and present curators of medical history, and a curator specializing in architecture, engineering, and design, all working in the Washington D.C. area. “There is no typical day,” says Judy Chelnick, Associate Curator in the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. When we spoke, she was cataloguing and having photographs taken of a collection of eighteenth-century European apothecary objects (mortars and pestles, glass vessels, even preserved animals), and working on a book chapter. That day she also gave behind-the-scenes tours to eighth-graders on their class trip, and to biotechnology students from Johns Hopkins University.

Botanical Print, from the
Hortus
Malabaricus,
Amsterdam,
1678-­‐1693, Public Domain

Curators might attend a collections committee meeting to decide on an object to acquire, or answer inquiries from the public. “I got a call from a gentleman who has been collecting medical figurines, and he’s got about 1,800 of them,” Chelnick said. “We get a lot of calls that are similar to this, where people have large collections, and they want to see them go to a museum.” Others need help identifying an object, or figuring out if a possession is valuable. Curators may also approach the owner or inventor of a unique object to inquire about obtaining it for their institution’s collection. Although much of their work takes place behind the scenes, curators have plenty of interaction with the public. Touwaide, who is Scientific Director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, currently hosted by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has “a very large palette of public programs.” His work enables the museum to promote the tradition of medicinal plants as “a source of knowledge not only for research but for healthy living,” a mission he sees as urgent. Just down the street at the National Museum of American History, curators are also working to bring their collections to the general public. Each year curators from different departments at the museum bring objects from storage out onto the floor. “We set up tables,” Chelnick says. “The theme this year is ‘Objects from the Fifties and Sixties’ so I’m bringing out braces and eyeglasses to show the public. And it goes over really well – it’s a lot of fun.” Curators may also conduct ground-breaking research. Touwaide and his team work on texts in ancient Latin, Greek, and Arabic, and scientists and scholars studying the ancient medical traditions of other parts of the world have taken note of the concepts and methods the Institute has developed. “We have received a request from Sri Lanka to help them digitize 7,000 medical texts on palm tree leaves – palm trees were used as paper in this area in the past – in order to explore them as we do the ancient Mediterranean tradition,” he says. Scholars from India, China, and elsewhere have been in touch. Touwaide also works with pharmaceutical companies that hope ancient remedies can lead to new medicines. But research and work is not focused solely on the past. At the National Building Museum, Leavitt commissioned three films for the recent House and Home exhibition [through May 2017: http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/house-and-home.html]. For his exhibit, Dream Anatomy, Mike Sappol, a historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, worked with contemporary artists like Jussi Ängeslevä. Ängeslevä designed an interactive installation that allowed a visitor to track segments of the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human data set against his or her own body. [http://angesleva.iki.fi/experimental/bodyscanner/] Sappol has also developed companion websites to exhibitions – Dream Anatomy’s web version [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy/] still gets hundreds of thousands of hits each year. For Sarah Leavitt, the typical day “absolutely depends on where in the exhibition cycle we are.” Preparing a new exhibition generally takes at least two years, often longer.

Anatomically labeled foot x-ray , 1920, Public Domain

What takes so long? Leavitt and other curators conduct research, write exhibit text, select objects, verify their availability, and arrange loans of objects from other places. They also must determine the condition of the objects, and they may send the most fragile to conservation, to be cleaned, stabilized, and readied for display or travel. The intensity of the work increases as the opening draws near. Once the show is in place, curators my give tours for V.I.P.s and museum staff, or gather scholars for symposia or lectures. “Then I’m starting again on a new project – again, I’m in the research and writing phase,” says Leavitt. Special exhibitions and even permanent exhibits are always a team effort. “It’s quite elaborate,” says Chelnick. “I’m working on a small exhibit case right now [of mostly cardiology objects]. So I proposed the idea, I wrote the labels, but I was assigned a designer, an editor, and a project manager, all for this one little exhibit,” which took “five or six months” from conception to finished product. Curators may also work with registrars (who register and track objects and handle insurance and transport), object handlers, publicity, staff educators, and fundraisers. To become a curator, an advanced degree in history, museum studies, art history, archaeology, or a similar discipline is needed, and most curators have had an internship of some kind. But for many it really starts in childhood. Judy Chelnick recalls her father encouraging her interest in history at the dinner table, where he’d quiz the family on state capitals, or she’d listen to her grandparents’ stories of immigrating to America. “It always fascinated me. It just seemed natural to major in history when I was in college.” Leavitt, too, found inspiration for her future career on family visits to Old World Wisconsin (a historic village with costumed interpreters) and the dollhouse collection at the state historical society. For Sappol and Touwaide, the route was more circuitous. Touwaide hoped to escape the family business of pharmacy, but, he says, “it’s probably in my genes!” He wound up combining his study of the classics with the pharmaceutical sciences. Sappol’s doctorate in cultural history and postgraduate work at the Mütter Museum and the Philadelphia College of Physicians eventually led to a job as curator and historian in the NLM’s then-new exhibition program. But the past was a refuge: “I sort of became an historian because I can’t cope with the present,” he quips. His new project explores modernist scientific and medical illustration from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. “Now that we’re in the twenty-first century, I feel like the twentieth century is safe.” According to Chelnick, one of the biggest challenges curators face is finding space for their collections. At one point, her division lost half its storage space to renovations. “We had to make decisions about which objects would be sent to offsite storage. And it was excruciating – like parting with your children, or sending them off to college. There’s just never enough space. I think it’s the bane of all museums.” Leavitt finds the concise writing demanded by exhibition labels rigorous but ultimately satisfying. “You have to write them over and over and over until they say exactly what you want them to say.” Sappol says internal politics can be tricky to navigate, especially for a large exhibition with many participants.

Cabinet of curiosities ca.1695, Public Domain

What is the best thing about being a curator? “You’re always learning,” says Chelnick. Leavitt and Sappol, too, see this as part of curating’s appeal as does Touwaide. But there’s no lack of other kinds of excitement. For Chelnick, it’s “working with the objects.... I don’t quite know how to articulate that, but there’s a thrill that you get when you look at something or you hold something that’s made history, that there’s only one like it in the world.” Sappol and Leavitt thrill to the adrenaline rush of working hard on a project with strong deadlines. “It’s fantastic,” says Sappol. “You’re putting on a show. All of a sudden you’re the center of attention, and you learn a lot, you’re looking at things deeply, you’re sharing them with a lot of people. It kind of ripples through reviews in newspapers and special curators’ tours that you give.” Leavitt says, “my favorite part is when the exhibition is being put together physically in the gallery...that’s always exciting, to see it come to life.” In the weeks surrounding the opening, curators are in demand, giving interviews, talks, and tours, and nailing down last- minute details. “It’s like a drug,” says Sappol. “It works brilliantly, and it’s also a project: you work like a dog, and you hit your deadline. And after the deadline maybe you can tinker with it a little bit, but it’s done. You’re putting on a show.” Chelnick tells students, “You really have to love what you do, because the reward is working with the objects – it’s not going to be monetary. “ Still, she says, “I’ve been very lucky with my career.”

Anne Pushkal is a writer, editor, and translator. She teaches art history at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and literacy at Hopeworks in Camden, NJ.